swift paddles.
It contained an old Umatilla Indian, his daughter, and a young warrior.
The party were going to the young chief's funeral.

[Illustration: _Multnomah Falls._]

As the canoe glided on amid the still fishermen of other tribes, the
Indian maiden began to sing. It was a strange song, of immortality, and of
spiritual horizons beyond the visible life. The Umatillas have poetic
minds. To them white Tacoma with her gushing streams means a mother's
breast, and the streams themselves, like the Falls of the distant
Shoshone, were "falling splendors."

She sang in Chinook, and the burden of her song was that horizons will
lift forever in the unknown future. The Chinook word _tamala_ means
"to-morrow"; and to-morrow, to the Indian mind, was eternal life.

The young warrior joined in the refrain, and the old Indian listened. The
thought of the song was something as follows:

"Aha! it is ever to-morrow, to-morrow--
Tamala, tamala, sing as we row;
Lift thine eye to the mount; to the wave give thy sorrow;
The river is bright, and the rivulets flow;
Tamala, tamala,
Ever and ever;
The morrows will come and the morrows will go--
Tamala! tamala!

"Happy boat, it is ever to-morrow, to-morrow--
Tamala, whisper the waves as they flow;
The crags of the sunset the smiles of light borrow,
And soft from the ocean the Chinook winds blow:
Tamala, tamala,
Ever and ever;
The morrows will come and the morrows will go--
Tamala! tamala!

"Aha! the night comes, but the light is to-morrow--
Tamala, tamala, sing as we go;
The waves ripple past, like the heart-beats of sorrow,
And the oar beats the wave to our song as we row:
Tamala, tamala,
Ever and ever;
The morrows will come and the morrows will go--
Tamala! tamala!

"For ever and ever horizons are lifting--
Tamala, tamala, sing as we row;
And life toward the stars of the ocean is drifting,
Through death will the morrow all endlessly glow--
Tamala, tamala,
Ever and ever;
The morrows will come and the morrows will go,
Tamala! tamala!"

The paddle dipped in the wave at the word _tamala_, and lifted high to
mark the measure of the song, and strew in the warm, soft air the watery
jewels colored by the far fires of the Sound. So the boat swept on, like a
spirit bark, and the beautiful word of immortality was echoed from the
darkening bluffs and the primitive pine cathedrals.

The place where the grave had been made was on the borders of the Oregon
desert, a wild, open region, walled with tremendous forests, and spreading
out in the red sunset like a sea. It had a scanty vegetation, but a slight
rain would sometimes change it into a billowy plain of flowers.

The tribe had begun to assemble about the grave early in the long
afternoon. They came one by one, solitary and silent, wrapped in blankets
and ornamented with gray plumes. The warriors came in the same solitary
way and met in silence, and stood in a long row like an army of shadows.
Squaws came, leading children by the hand, and seated themselves on the
soft earth in the same stoical silence that had marked the bearing of the
braves.

A circle of lofty firs, some three hundred feet high, threw a slanting
shadow over the open grave, the tops gleaming with sunset fire.

Afar, Mount Hood, the dead volcano, lifted its roof of glaciers twelve
thousand feet high. Silver ice and black carbon it was now, although in
the long ages gone it had had a history written in flame and smoke and
thunder. Tradition says that it sometimes, even now, rumbles and flashes
forth in the darkness of night, then sinks into rest again, under its
lonely ice palaces so splendid in the sunset, so weird under the moon.